Richard Halliburton was a misfit, a rebel, in an America that was coming of age in the world. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most famous persons in America, even more than Amelia Earhart, and today he is forgotten.
He knew many people who would not fit in the handy boxes society offered them. Paul Mooney sailed across the Pacific with him in a Chinese junk. Moye Stephens flew as a stunt pilot in Howard Hughes' silent movies. Elly Beinhorn was Germany's Amelia Earhart. Pancho Barnes founded the Happy Bottom Riding Club. Halliburton met history makers like Lenin's widow and the man who shot the Czar. He chatted with Herbert Hoover, was friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Available at Amazon. Also available at Barnes & Noble or other book stores.

Fugue:
My soul is like a hidden orchestra; I do not know which instruments grind and
play away inside of me, strings and harps, timbales and drums. I can only
recognize myself as a symphony.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Book of DisquietCounter Fugue:
What I cannot build, I cannot understand.
—Richard Feynman, physicist. as quoted by Craig Venter & encoded as a watermark in DNA of the first ever synthetic organism.

You are here in the Milky Way Galaxy, 1 of about 100 billion in the visible universe. This is not science-fiction.

Clouds & ClocksAll they have in common are the first three letters.
You can disassemble clocks. You can reduce them to their parts, then put them back together. You can't do that with clouds. Therein lies the difference between reductionism and emergent systems, as well as reductionism & the unnameable.

Foucault Pendulum

In 1851, Jean Bernard Léon Foucault (1819-1868) demonstrated the Earth turning. At the Paris Pantheon, the pendulum revealed reality not as it seems. Human kind
cannot bear very much reality, said TS Eliot. People are comfortable in the way things seem. Some guests in 1851 thought the pendulum moved with Earth stationary. But gravity kept it moving in the same plane as Earth turned along with the building from which it hung. They felt none of it, just as we feel none of the following phenomena. Earth rotates about 1000 mph (1680 kph) on its axis. At 66,000 mph it fully orbits the sun once a year. With Earth & other planets in tow, the sun orbits our Milky Way galaxy at 483,000 mph, completing the orbit every 230 million years. Somehow the pendulum ignores these "local" motions and aligns with its original orientation. How can this be? Nobody understands why it swings relative to the universe as a whole, but that seems to be the case.

An avowed rationalist, W.C. Fields was reading a Gideon Bible in a hotel room when his manager entered. "Bill," said the manager, "What the hell are you doing? I thought you were an atheist."
"Just looking for loopholes," said Fields. "Just looking for loopholes."

4/12/11

American Relief Expedition & The Great Soviet Famine

"The typical American reaction to this jaw-dropping moment of history is: How come I've never heard about this? . . .

[Soviet Russia] had a transportation system in chaos, a hostile climate, a mistrustful Bolshevik government that spied on the U.S. relief workers [of The American Relief Administration] and the horrifying magnitude of a catastrophic famine that threatened 16 million with starvation at its height in the winter of 1921.

The famine, exacerbated by government mass requisitioning of grain in the previous years, was killing about 100,000 people a week. . .

People had been reduced to eating weeds mixed up with ground bones, tree bark and clay, as well as horses, dogs, cats, rats and the straw from roofs. The government made efforts to stop the selling of human flesh and posted guards in cemeteries to prevent raiding.

'I have seen piles of corpses half naked and frozen into the most grotesque positions with signs of having been preyed upon by wandering dogs. I have seen these bodies – and it is a sight that I can never forget,' wrote William Shafroth, the son of Colorado's governor and an ARA worker in Soviet Russia.

His letters recalled visiting an orphanage in Kazan on the Volga with lice-ridden children 'huddled together in compact masses like a seal colony.'

Most had been orphaned or deserted by their parents.

'I saw emaciated little skeletons. . . .'

The first American relief ships arrived in Soviet Russia in September 1921. In December, the U.S. Congress passed an appropriation to send $20 million worth of corn and wheat seed to starving Russia. About 300 relief workers set off into unfamiliar terrain – often by horse, camel and sled – to assess needs and arrange for storehouses for the millions of bushels of corn and thousands of tons of seed, which began to arrive in the Russian heartland in March 1922.

spiritrambler(at)gmail.com

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence. W.B.Yeats

I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what dream it was.A Midsummer Night's Dream, Iv, i.&nbsp
(On John Van Druten's gravestone. Van Druten & Halliburton were companions until for undisclosed reasons Richard broke away, probably because he was coming into the public limelight as a successful writer.)

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees/
Is my destroyer./
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose/
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
Dylan Thomas

More Is Different: EmergenceAs P.W. Anderson had it, here is a broken symmetry. A new level of understanding must be created before we can move on to the next level. You cannot be explained in terms of the particles which compose you.

Time is the school in which we learn.

Time is the fire in which we burn.(Delmore Schwarz)

It is utterly beyond our power to measure the changes of things by time. Quite the contrary, time is an abstraction at which we arrive by means of the changes of things. &nbsp Ernst Mach